Undrawing tattoos

The BBC has an article by Mario Cacciottolo about taking tats off:

Tass Cambitzi has been tattooed eighteen times, but is now undergoing painful laser removal. She has struggled to find value and self-worth all her life, but believes this will be easier without tattoos. “I want to start again,” she says. “I want nothingness.”
The walls in the tattoo removal suite are white, and its rooms are small and full of equipment and surgical tables. Tass is here to have more of her tattoos removed by laser. “I dread the sessions,” she says. "On a scale of one to ten, the level of pain is eleven. The parts of my body which are laser'd feel hot afterwards, and they swell.”
Photographs of her arm after a previous treatment show large, greenish blisters clinging to it. The laser breaks down the tattoo's pigment, allowing the body's lymphatic system to gradually remove the destroyed ink from the skin. But the beam is incredibly hot.
Since October of 2014, Tass has been doggedly undergoing these removal sessions in a tiny underground studio in London, England's Soho. She's had about a dozen sessions so far, determined to remove by light what was drawn by needle.
Tass, who lives in Gloucestershire, says getting inked cost a total of £1,500, while the removal process is costing £5,500.
Tass was depressed as a teenager, and eventually went through periods of addiction to drink and drugs. Her tattoos were an armor, and served as two messages. One was 'look at me' and invited attention. Another was a protective measure of 'please don't get too close'. "They provided a barrier between me and a world I was frightened of. Most of my tattoos are memorable dates, memorable words, things that I felt frightened of losing. I felt that if I was able to stamp them into my life somehow, then I wouldn't lose them.”
But Tass does not need them any longer.
Tass, short for Anastasia,  grew up in London, but her parents separated when she was eight. She wouldn't regularly see her father again, who is Greek, until she was eighteen.
She was sent to a boarding school in High Wycombe at the age of seven, then another in Ascot at the age of thirteen, until she was asked to leave at fifteen because of her behavior.
Her first brush with the tattoo needle was in London's Kensington Market when she was fourteen, a small flower-like design picked off the tattooist's wall and put on to her hip.
"My first was an act of rebellion. It was like trying a cigarette or alcohol. I took quite a lot of pleasure of saying to my mother 'by the way, I got a tattoo'. I was not a pleasant teenager. I wanted to hurt people I'd perceived had hurt me. With hindsight I can see that a lot of my actions were attention-seeking, but at the cost of myself, because I'm the one who's suffered for it. I started smoking and using cocaine by fourteen. I didn't even know what it was when cocaine was offered to me, I just did it. Later, when I was using more drugs, I'd do whatever was going. They were ways to connect me to people who I thought had a strong sense of identity, the cool kids, the older kids. People who I thought could keep me safe. Drug-taking and tattoos are part of the price you pay for being accepted by the tribe.”
One person who remained as a constant through Tass' childhood was her older brother Alexander.

"Out of the night that covers me, 

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul."

 That is the first stanza of Invictus, by William Ernest Henley, published in 1888. The poem's popularity is enduring, having been used by Winston Churchill in a House of Commons speech during World War Two, and quoted by Barack Obama at Nelson Mandela's memorial service in 2013, among many other references in popular culture.
Mandela himself recited it to fellow prisoners while imprisoned on Robben Island.
Tass likes Invictus so much she had the word tattooed on her forearm, and learned the poem by heart. “The first two lines are particularly significant for me, which mention 'from pole to pole', because I was diagnosed as bipolar at fifteen, put on medication and into mental institutions.” Getting the Invictus tattoo, large and unmissable on her right arm, was a “very, very impulsive” act. She decided upon it one morning, and by lunchtime was under the needle. The ink is so thick it has only partially responded to the laser removal.
Aged eighteen, by now sober, she had Ad Augusta Per Angusta etched into her upper left arm. It means “to greatness through anguish” in Latin. She got it when she was living in Florida.
When she was nineteen, Tass got Apophainesthai tattooed on her right forearm, a Greek word which she says means 'to know thyself'. “Which is ironic,” she says, “as the tattoos are clear evidence of my self-doubt and lack of self-knowledge.”
She say this phrase complements both the twelve-step approach she found in therapy groups, of taking a look at yourself rather than the world around you to instigate change, and also the yogic practice of self-study, known as svadhyaya.
When she was 24, Tass got Latin words inked on her fingers. She had been living in the Bahamas off and on since she was sixteen, bonding tightly with Pip, a woman her mother knew who ran a hotel there, and her family. Tass took them as her own, living with them, and Pip adopted Tass almost as her own daughter. But Tass sometimes behaved badly. She was supposed to work at the hotel, but didn't really do much.
Before she got sober she'd often get drunk and high, partying hard on the tropical island, disrupting the family, running up huge phone bills with calls to South Africa.
Even after she was sober, she caused the family problems, the final straw being a time when she was responsible for Pip's son missing a flight off the island.
In 2006, Tass returned to the UK for what was supposedly a short trip and, while there, Pip sent over a four-page fax, saying that they did not want her to come back. They loved her, but not her behavior. “I was absolutely gutted,” Tass says. “I just remember feeling so, so alone.”
Having received this crushing news in London, she walked across the street to a tattoo parlor, and got two Latin phrases tattooed on her fingers. One said Cor Ad Cor Loquitur (the heart speaks to the heart) and the other In Deo Speramus (in God we trust).
In 2010, when Tass reached ten years of being sober, she threw a party, paid for by her godfather. It took nine months to plan.
She also had a deal with a Milan, Italy shoe company to design footwear around this time so she was feeling “excited and ambitious”. The party was a celebration of her life, of how ten years prior, her heart had stopped in Chelsea and Westminster hospital after a suicide attempt, and she had to be brought back.

A close friend, Petra, (photo, right, above) was supposed to take photographs at the party, but called just before to say she wasn't up to it. The two had known each other since they were about three, attending the same birthday parties, and ending up at the same school. Petra had been diagnosed with an eating disorder in her early teens and fought against it.
But she lost that battle in December of 2010, after taking a heavy cocktail of psychotropic drugs. Her death hit Tass (photo, left, above) very hard. “We had both, in our own ways, usually misguided, tried to find a place to belong in a world that frightened us, that we had never quite felt good enough for.”

Tass turned to yoga. She says her life to this day is directly influenced by her friend's death, and she now teaches yoga (photo, above). “Every year, on 22 December, I go to the bridge that her ashes were thrown from, and I read her a letter about my findings and progress over the past year. I ask her to watch over me for the following year, and hold me back from being deceived by the temptation of nestling into yet another new identity, to stay grounded in me and that I am enough.”
Tass reached her early thirties and continued to get more tattoos. The last were anatomical drawings in the style of Leonardo da Vinci of a hand, a spinal cord (photo below), and a skull. “As crazy as it sounds, I wanted something to make the Invictus less legible so people would stop touching them and talking to me about it. Because I'm a yoga teacher, and interested in the body and have done trauma work, the anatomy drawings spoke to me.”

The reference to trauma relates to her work in prisons, where she's helped with addiction therapy. She was also once involved in a two-year scheme with the now-closed Kids Company, aimed at preventing young people from joining gangs. There have also been meditation and yoga workshops with the mental health charity Bipolar UK.
Tass says her relationship with the people she's known in her life, and even those just passing through, is “love me, love me, love me, but don't come too close. The tattoos provided the perfect vehicle for that, because they invite attention, but because of the nature that a tattoo is put on, it's quite violent to drill ink into your skin, it gives you a tough quality. You're never going to find your value, or your identity, through anything externally. You cannot be defined by anything.”
Tass says she's realized she isn't defined by her past, or who she's in a relationship with, or her job. “I don't want my story shown on my body any more. And it's not that I'm not proud of my story, I'm very proud of it. None of my tattoos are silly. They all have deep meaning to them. I still believe in all of my tattoos. And to some extent, even though I will never entertain him in my life again, I still believe in the love between my ex and I.”
She has realized, she says, that while those things all still exist, she does not need to grip them. “I've lived off medication for nine years now. I support myself through a healthy diet, yoga, and my support system, which includes my brother. I don't really display any bipolar symptoms now.” Still she wants these traces of her former life gone, but for some areas of her body the pain is a barrier. “Getting the tattoos done on my back, leg, and lower abdomen was excruciatingly painful. So the thought of removing them makes me wince. They're so enormous, and the ink is so thick, and there are many nerve endings where they are located. So I won't do them. But I feel sadness that I can't take them off.”

Tass hopes a gentler technology can be developed to allow her to have the rest of her tattoos removed in a less painful way. And there will still be shadows of the ones that have gone. “But when I wake up now, and my arm used to be black, I think; it's better than it was.”

Rico says he has one friend who has nearly-full-body-coverage tattoos, but doesn't want one himself, and doesn't (with the exception of Danielle Colby, photo below, from Antique Archeology) fancy ladies who do, so he's pleased this one is taking them off...